A screengrab from a handout video shows what the Israeli Army says is recently killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar walking through a tunnel before the October 7 attacks, in this screengrab obtained by Reuters, released on October 19, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The Israeli Army on Saturday (October 19, 2024) released footage it said showed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar preparing for a prolonged stay underground in Gaza hours before the Palestinian group launched its October 7 attack.

Sinwar, then Hamas’s top figure in the Gaza Strip, is accused of masterminding the unprecedented attack last year that triggered the ongoing war. He was killed by Israeli forces earlier this week.

The footage released by the Israeli military showed Sinwar with his wife and children in a tunnel that Army spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said was under the family home in Khan Yunis.

“You can see how Sinwar and his family members escape to an underground compound under their house on the night of October 6, just hours before the brutal massacre,” Mr. Hagari told a televised briefing while showing the grainy footage.

Sinwar, wearing a plain t-shirt, is seen walking through the tunnel with his two children and wife.

“They are alone for hours. Sinwar and his son go up and down, equipping themselves with plates of food, water, pillows, a plasma screen, mattresses and other products for a long stay,” said Mr. Hagari.

The spokesman showed images of the underground compound which had toilets, showers and a kitchen. He said food, cash and some documents were also found there.

The release of the video comes days after Sinwar was killed by troops in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, in a firefight that ended with the Hamas leader cornered and alone in a destroyed building.

Drone footage, also released by the Israeli military after his death, showed an apparently injured Sinwar throwing an object at the drone in his final moments.

The military has also shared footage showing an Israeli tank firing on the building Sinwar was said to be in.

‘Underground fortress’

The New York Times reported that an Israeli autopsy found that Sinwar was killed by a gunshot to the head.

“Sinwar built an underground fortress in his hometown of Khan Yunis. There he hid and continued to launch the attack,” Mr. Hagari said in his Saturday briefing.

Israeli forces had almost closed on him several times during the war, but he managed to escape, Mr. Hagari said.

“For the vast majority of time Sinwar hid underground between Khan Yunis and Rafah,” he said of southern Gaza’s two main cities.

Israel had identified Sinwar’s final hiding after the military found “his DNA sample on a tissue with which he blew his nose,” said Mr. Hagari.

Hamas dismissed as “blatant lies” Mr. Hagari’s remarks suggesting that Sinwar had gone into hiding and prioritised his family’s well-being over that of other Gazans.

“Commander Yahya Sinwar was martyred after heroically engaging in battle, having led the greatest battle in the history of our Palestinian people,” a Hamas statement said.

According to the military, an Israeli patrol encountered Sinwar and two other militants by chance on Wednesday, and as they were chased by soldiers, Sinwar split from the other two.

The military said a tank later fired at the building where Sinwar took cover.

Footage released by the military shortly after Sinwar’s death was announced on Thursday showed him covered in dust, sitting in an armchair and staring down a drone as it entered the building, much of it in ruins.

The footage showed Sinwar alone with one hand severely injured and his head covered in a traditional scarf, throwing a stick at the approaching drone.

“This is actually the first time that Sinwar, who had been hiding underground for a year, met the IDF (army) forces in Gaza and this is also the moment when he was eliminated,” Mr. Hagari said on Saturday.

“Sinwar lived and behaved like a wanted terrorist.”

The Hamas leader, who just months ago replaced his slain predecessor Ismail Haniyeh, had not been seen in public throughout the war.

Israeli planes dropped leaflets over southern Gaza on Saturday showing a picture of the dead Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar with the message that “Hamas will no longer rule Gaza”, echoing language used by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The move came as Israeli military strikes killed at least 35 people across the Gaza Strip and its forces tightened a siege around hospitals in Jabalia in the north of the enclave, Palestinian health officials said.

“Whoever drops the weapon and hands over the hostages will be allowed to leave and live in peace,” the leaflet, written in Arabic, read, according to residents of the southern city of Khan Younis and images circulating online.

The leaflet’s wording was from a statement by Netanyahu on Thursday after Sinwar was killed by Israeli soldiers operating in Rafah, in the south near the Egyptian border, on Wednesday.

The October 7 attack Sinwar planned on Israeli communities a year ago killed around 1,200 people, with another 253 dragged back to Gaza as hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel’s subsequent war has devastated Gaza, killing more than 42,500 Palestinians, with another 10,000 uncounted dead thought to lie under the rubble, Gaza health authorities say.

In the central Gaza Strip camp of Al-Maghzai, an Israeli strike on a house killed 11 people, while another strike at the nearby camp of Nuseirat killed four others.

Five other people were killed in two separate strikes in the south Gaza cities of Khan Younis and Rafah, medics said, while seven Palestinians were killed in the Shati camp in the northern Gaza Strip.

Later on Saturday, an Israeli strike killed three Palestinians in Nuseirat in central Gaza, medics said.

Late on Friday, medics said 33 people, mostly women and children, were killed and 85 others were wounded in Israeli strikes that destroyed at least three houses in Jabalia.

The Israeli military said it was unaware of that incident.

It said forces were continuing operations against Hamas across the enclave, killing several gunmen in Rafah and Jabalia and dismantling military infrastructure. Palestinian medics said five people were killed in Jabalia on Saturday.

EVACUATION ORDERS

Residents and medics said Israeli forces had tightened their siege on Jabalia, the largest of the enclave’s eight historic camps, which it encircled by also sending tanks to nearby towns of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya and issuing evacuation orders to residents.

Israeli officials said evacuation orders were aimed at separating Hamas fighters from civilians and denied that there was any systematic plan to clear civilians out of Jabalia or other northern areas.

In Jabalia, residents said Israeli army forces besieged several shelters housing displaced families before they stormed them and detained dozens of men. Footage circulated on social media, which Reuters could not immediately verify, showed dozens of Palestinian men sitting on the ground next to a tank, while others were led by a soldier to a gathering site.

Residents and medical officials said Israeli forces were bombing houses and besieging hospitals, preventing medical and food supplies from entering to force them to leave the camp.

Health officials said they refused orders by the Israeli army to evacuate the hospital or leave the patients, many in a critical condition, unattended.

“The Israeli occupation is intensifying its targeting of the health system in the northern Gaza Strip, by besieging and directly targeting the Indonesian Hospital, Kamal Adwan Hospital, and Al-Awda Hospital during the past hours and its insistence on putting them out of service,” the Gaza health ministry said.

It said two patients in intensive care at the Indonesian Hospital died “as a result of the hospital’s siege and the power outage and medical supplies”.

Israel’s military said the troops operating in the area had been “briefed on the importance of mitigating harm to civilians and medical infrastructure”.

“It is emphasized that the hospital continues to operate without disruption and in full capacity, and there was no intentional fire directed at it,” it said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Doha, Qatar:

Israel’s killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar dealt a huge blow to the Palestinian group, and while it leaves a gaping void at the top of the movement, its militants remain determined to fight.

Sinwar masterminded the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that sparked the Gaza war, and became the leader of Hamas in August after the death of his predecessor, Ismail Haniyeh.

While Israel has hailed Sinwar’s killing as a major win, analysts say Hamas could use his legacy to mobilise a new generation of militants, who grew up suffering the consequences of Israel’s retaliatory war.

Here is a look at what could come next for Hamas.

How harsh a blow?

Confirming Sinwar’s death in a video statement on Friday, Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya said the group was mourning the loss of its “great leader”.

Sinwar’s killing was not just “an extremely symbolic event” but created “a leadership vacuum in this very networked organisation”, Middle East analyst Andreas Krieg of King’s College London said.

His death comes little more than two months after the death in Iran of Hamas’s political chief Ismail Haniyeh.

Hamas and Iran have blamed Israel for Haniyeh’s death, though Israel has not offered comment.

Krieg said differences had emerged between Hamas’s political leadership, in exile mostly in Qatar, and the military and operational wings in Gaza.

In July Israel also said it killed Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif in Gaza, which Hamas has denied.

“Different cells of Hamas will continue fighting, but at the core of the movement, there’s a vacuum there, and that will make it very difficult to coordinate,” Krieg said.

James Dorsey, of the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute, said Sinwar was an “exceptional” figure in Hamas who enjoyed “broad support within the movement from both the political and the military wing”.

Who could replace Sinwar?

Following his predecessor’s death, Sinwar emerged from a field of contenders for the Hamas leadership that included relative moderates based outside of Gaza like Musa Abu Marzuk, an adviser and negotiator seen as close to Haniyeh.

Dorsey said other exiled Hamas figures like Qatar-based Hayya, close to Sinwar and lead negotiator in unsuccessful talks for a Gaza truce and hostage exchange, could once again become contenders for the top post.

Other exiled leaders who could take over, he said, include Khaled Meshaal, who served as Hamas chief until he was replaced by Haniyeh in 2017.

Sinwar’s selection as leader over members of its political wing in August was widely viewed as a restructuring of the movement around armed struggle, with the focus on the war in Gaza.

Krieg said “the next leader is inevitably going to be someone from the operational level”.

Should the leadership be handed to a man on the battlefield, one name has emerged as a favourite: that of Sinwar’s younger brother Mohammed Sinwar.

Krieg said the brother “doesn’t have the charismatic leadership appeal that Yahya had. But he has a good reputation… as a militant and fighter.”

Can Hamas recover?

In his defiant statement on Friday, Hayya said Sinwar’s death would help strengthen the movement, adding his killing had set him among “the leaders and symbols of the movement who preceded him”.

Krieg said that, despite a “tactical, operational defeat” for Hamas with the killing of its leader, Sinwar’s death was “not going to change armed resistance against Israel within Gaza”.

Dorsey said Hamas was a movement that had “as a matter of principle proven very resilient”.

“Hamas’s history… is a history of Israel assassinating its leaders. Yahya Sinwar joins the list,” he added.

The killed leader’s legacy would “obviously” be tied to the legacy of the October 7 attack, said Dorsey.

But whether the war sparked by the attack could continue to swell Hamas’s ranks has as much to do with the sheer levels of desperation in Gaza as it does with Sinwar.

“This is a generation that has lost all hope… certainly in Gaza. If you have no hope, you’ve got nothing and nowhere to go, you’ve got nothing to lose,” Dorsey said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Though he was Israel’s most-wanted man, Sinwar’s death came unexpectedly even for the Israeli forces who appeared to have run across him unknowingly in a battle

Israeli forces were not targetting Sinwar, chanced upon him in Rafah

Though he was Israel’s most-wanted man, Sinwar’s death came unexpectedly even for the Israeli forces who appeared to have run across him unknowingly in a battle, only to discover afterwards that the body in the rubble was his.

In a drone video, posted on X by several Israeli officials purpotedly showing Sinwar’s final moments, the former Hamas chief is seen covered in dust, sitting on a chair, in a room of a building hollowed-out by airstrikes. As the drone moves closer to him, Sinwar appears to throw a stick at the drone.

According to the Israeli military, an additional shell was then at the building, causing it to collapse and killing Sinwar. Israel military spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari Sinwar was found with a bulletproof vest, grenades, and 40,000 shekels ($10,707). He added that his troops had identified three Hamas militants running from building to building in Gaza’s southernmost city, Rafah. Sinwar, turned out to be one of them. The troops attempted to shoot them before they ran inside a building.

Photos circulating online showed the body of a man resembling Sinwar with a gaping head wound, dressed in a military-style vest, half buried in the rubble of a destroyed building. The security official confirmed the photos were taken by Israeli security officials at the scene. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.

Hamas has not confirmed his death.

The military said three militants were killed in the operation. Police said one of them was confirmed as Sinwar by dental records, fingerprints and DNA tests. Sinwar was imprisoned by Israel from the late 1980s until 2011, and during that time he underwent treatment for brain cancer — leaving Israeli authorities with extensive medical records.

Netanyahu says Sinwar killing ‘beginning of the end’ of Gaza war

 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the killing of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar in the Gaza Strip was the “beginning of the end” of the year-long war in the Palestinian territory.

Mr. Netanyahu, who vowed to crush Hamas at the start of the war, hailed Sinwar’s killing, saying: “While this is not the end of the war in Gaza, it’s the beginning of the end.”

(With inputs from agencies)

Yahya Sinwar, Hassan Nasrallah, and Ismail Haniyeh who were killed in the ongoing war with Israel.

On October 17 2024, Israel announced the death of Yahya Sinwar, a chief architect of Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, that sparked the Israel-Hamas war. This comes on the heels of Israeli strikes in Lebanon that killed many high-ranking Hezbollah leaders in recent weeks, including Hassan Nasrallah . So far, several Hamas and Hezbollah leaders have been killed along with other militants since the beginning of the current war.

Also read: Sinwar killing LIVE updates

Here’s a list of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders who have been killed in the ongoing war

1. Yahya Sinwar: Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. He was driven by his deep antipathy towards the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and deep commitment to the Islamist ideology of Hamas.

2. Hassan Nasrallah: Lebanon’s Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, whom Israel said on September 28, 2024, it has killed, led Hezbollah through decades of conflict with Israel, overseeing its transformation into a military force with regional sway and becoming one of the most prominent Arab figures in generations — with Iranian backing.

3. Fatah Sharif: The Israeli Army said on September 30, 2024 that its forces “eliminated” Hamas’ leader Sharif in Lebanon, as it continued to target Iran-backed militant groups in the neighbouring country.

4. Ali Karaki: One of Hezbollah’s top commanders, Ali Karaki was killed in the airstrike that assassinated Nasrallah. The Israeli military said more than 20 militants of varying ranks were killed in the strike on a underground bunker.

5. Nabil Kaouk: Kaouk, who was killed in an airstrike on September 28, 2024, was the deputy head of Hezbollah’s Central Council. 

6. Mohammed Srur: Srur was the head of Hezbollah’s drone unit, which was used for the first time in this current conflict with Israel. Under his leadership, Hezbollah launched exploding and reconnaissance drones deep into Israel, penetrating its defense systems, which had mostly focused on the group’s rockets and missiles.

7. Ibrahim Qubaisi: He led Hezbollah’s missile unit. The Israeli military says Qubaisi planned the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli soldiers at the northern border in 2000, whose bodies were returned in a prisoner swap with Hezbollah four years later.

8. Ibrahim Aqil: Ibrahim Aqil, the Hezbollah operations commander killed in an Israeli strike on September 20, 2024, had a $7 million bounty on his head for two 1983 Beirut truck bombings that killed more than 300 people at the American embassy and a U.S. Marines barracks.

9. Ahmed Mahmud Wahbi: Ahmed Wahbi, a top commander who oversaw the military operations of the Radwan special forces until early 2024, was killed in an Israel strike that targeted several top commanders in the Beirut suburbs on September 20, including Ibrahim Aqil.

10. Fuad Shukr: An Israeli strike on the southern suburbs of Lebanon’s capital on July 30 killed Hezbollah’s top commander Fuad Shukr. Shukr had been one of Hezbollah’s leading military figures since it was established by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in 1982.

11. Mohammed Nasser: Mohammed Nasser was killed in an Israeli airstrike on July 3. Israel claimed responsibility, saying he headed a unit responsible for firing from southwestern Lebanon at Israel. Nasser, a senior commander in Hezbollah, was responsible for a section of Hezbollah’s operations at the frontier, according to senior security sources in Lebanon.

12. Taleb Abdallah: Senior Hezbollah field commander Abdallah was killed on June 12 in a strike claimed by Israel, which said it had hit a command and control centre in southern Lebanon. Security sources in Lebanon said he was Hezbollah’s commander for the central region of the southern border strip and was of the same rank as Nasser.

13. Mohammed Deif: Hamas leader Deif was killed in an air strike by Israeli military on August 1. Deif had been on Israel’s kill list at least since the early 2000s.

14. Ismail Haniyeh: Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated on July 31 during a visit to Tehran. He had been the Hamas leader since 2017. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said he was killed by a short-range projectile.

15. Saleh-Al Arouri: An Israeli drone strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs of Dahiyeh killed deputy Hamas chief Saleh al-Arouri on January 2, 2024. Arouri was also the founder of Hamas’ military wing, the Qassam Brigades.

16. Marwan Issa: Deputy Hamas military commander Marwan Issa was killed in an Israeli strike in March, the Israeli military said. He had been at the top of Israel’s most-wanted listed alongside Deif and Sinwar.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday (October 17, 2024) that the killing of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar in the Gaza Strip was the “beginning of the end” of the year-long war in the Palestinian territory.

Mr. Netanyahu, who vowed to crush Hamas at the start of the war, hailed Sinwar’s killing, saying: “While this is not the end of the war in Gaza, it’s the beginning of the end.”

The Israeli military said that after a lengthy hunt, troops had on Wednesday (October 16, 2024) “eliminated Yahya Sinwar, the leader of the Hamas terrorist organisation, in an operation in the southern Gaza Strip”.

Read the full story below

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Born in a refugee camp in Khan Younis in southern Gaza in 1962, 14 years after the state of Israel was created, Yahya Sinwar grew up under foreign occupation – first Egyptian and then Israeli. File
| Photo Credit: AP

Immediately after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack in Israel, in which about 1,200 people were killed, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) called Yahya Sinwar, the leader of the Islamist militant group in Gaza and the key architect of the attack. “a dead man walking”. A year later, after killing over 42,000 Palestinians, a vast majority of them women and children, and turning much of Gaza into rubble, the IDF announced on Thursday (October 17, 2024) that it has killed its most wanted man in an operation in Gaza’s Rafah.

Also read: Israel’s Foreign Minister confirms that Hamas top leader Yahya Sinwar was killed in Gaza

Born in a refugee camp in Khan Younis in southern Gaza in 1962, 14 years after the state of Israel was created, Sinwar grew up under foreign occupation – first Egyptian and then Israeli. His parents were from Al-Majdal, a town north of Gaza today known as Ashkelon in Israel proper, from where they were forced out when the state of Israel was created in 1948. Some 7,00,000 Palestinians were made refugees between 1948-49, in what they call Nakba (catastrophe). The Sinwars fled south towards Gaza.

In Israeli jail

Sinwar became active in the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s and was first arrested by Israel in 1982, when he was 19. When Hamas was founded in 1987, Sinwar established the group’s internal security organisation, al-Majd, which was accused of targeting several Palestinians “for collaborating” with Israel. Sinwar was a brutal enforcer of loyalty. In 1988, he was arrested by the Israelis, convicted for the murder of 12 Palestinians and sentenced for four life sentences. He spent 22 years in Israeli prisons. But prison never broke him. He once told a Shin Bet interrogator, “You know that one day you will be the one under interrogation, and I will stand here as the government, as the interrogator.”

A fluent Hebrew speaker, Sinwar was driven by his deep antipathy towards the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and deep commitment to the Islamist ideology of Hamas. The Israeli prison for him was a learning “academy”. He said he was “married to the Palestinian cause”. And violence defined his method, right from the days when he was hunting down the “collaborators”.

Sinwar was released in 2011 as part of a prisoner swap deal when Israel freed 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for one soldier, Gilad Shalit, who had been taken captive by Hamas in 2006. By that time, Hamas was already in power in Gaza, and Ismail Haniyeh was its leader. As a former internal security chief who spent two decades in Israeli prisons, Sinwar already enjoyed a cult status among Hamas’s top ranks. He rose quickly within the militant group, and established close links with Haniyeh, and Hamas’s foreign backers, including Hezbollah and Iran. In 2012, Sinwar travelled to Iran to meet Qassem Soleimani, the Quds Force commander who was assassinated by the U.S. in January 2020 Baghdad.

The ruler of Gaza

In 2017, when Haniyeh became the head of Hamas’s Polit Bureau. Sinwar was chosen as the group’s leader in Gaza. A year later, in an interview, Sinwar said his life as the administrator of Gaza, which had been under Israeli blockade since 2007, was not any different from the time he spent in Israeli jails. “I have only changed prisons. And, despite it all, the old one was much better than this one. I had water, electricity. I had so many books. Gaza is much tougher,” he said. This was also the time when Hamas showed signs of moderation. It had halted suicide bombing. Its updated 2017 charter had expunged the anti-Semitic remarks of its original charter. Hamas leadership also signalled that they would accept the 1967 border as part of a long-term ceasefire with Israel.

But in the following years, Sinwar would see the Palestinian issue being pushed to a corner of West Asia. There were no talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Hamas controlled the blockaded Gaza, while Israel continued to deepen its occupation of the West Bank. The settler political class in Israel started pushing for the annexation of the West Bank settlements. Four Arab countries, including the UAE, would normalise ties with Israel in 2020 in an agreement brokered by the U.S. Saudi Arabia, the custodian of Islam’s two holiest mosques, was in an advanced stage of recognising the state of Israel.

October 7 attack

Sinwar’s response to the changes that were under way in the region was to launch a murderous attack inside Israel. The attack was an immediate success from his point of view — his forces took the Israelis by surprise. The famed Israeli intelligence agencies failed to foresee Sinwar’s move. Hamas militants unleashed violence for hours in Israeli towns. The political leadership was taken by surprise. But Sinwar perhaps miscalculated the Israeli response. He and millions of Palestinians had to pay a heavy price for his actions.

A vast majority of the victims of Hamas’ attack were Israeli civilians, which shook the country. The brutality of the attack further isolated Hamas, while Israel consolidated support among its allies, including the U.S. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on whose watch the attack unfolded, launched a vengeful war on the Palestinians in Gaza, destroying much of the enclave. Israel repeatedly resisted calls for a ceasefire, even amid high civilian casualties in Gaza. Over the past year, it killed several of its enemies. Mohammed Deif, Hamas’s military wing chief, was killed on July 13. Haniyeh was killed on July 31 in Tehran. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, was killed in a Beirut bombing on September 27. And now, Sinwar was also killed.

What is to be seen is whether these killings would provide Israel the long-term security it is pursuing or the wounds of the wars Israel is fighting would continue to trap the Jewish state in cycles of violence.